We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

I don't have a old dial phone, but I have the hand crank phone we had in the farm house from when I was a boy in Wisconsin. Party line and everything. In fact, if I remember right, we had the only telephone in our part of Franklin County for a few years. I remember the local ladies showing up on Friday afternoon for coffee and a phone call if they needed to make one.

At that time, they hadn't extended them fancy city slicker switching systems out that far from Milwaukee. The year before we moved East, we got a rotary phone.

Point of Interest: Our high school math club (and the amateur radio club) used to do field trips over to the Sylvania plant in Danvers to help program their huge Univac computer - upteen zillion vacuum tubes and, get this, 1/4 inch phone jacks. Had a blazing .5Kb of processing power. :>)

Good thing there was a monopoly or we would have had much more change much more often and God only knows how bad change is. Might have had cell phones when I was a kid in the '70's and that would have been awful!

Gee, how are we ever going to continue the wonderful monopolies on lawyers and doctors and all the other guilds? What ever will we do once they are affordable?

Might have had cell phones when I was a kid in the '70's and that would have been awful!

Let's see where the constraint was.

"In December 1971, AT&T submitted a proposal for cellular service to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). After years of hearings, the FCC approved the proposal in 1982 for Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) and allocated frequencies in the 824–894 MHz band."

We did not have the film, just printed instructions in the new 'phone books, before we changed to dials on Sunday, the fifth of July, 1959. I was so excited. I woke my parents and asked whether I could call my grandmother. Since I had only read the instructions, not seen this handy little film, I did not know that the dial tone just kept on going until you dialed. I thought it would "buzz" and then wait for me to dial. My parents had lived in Atlanta, GA, so they knew what to do, and encouraged me to go ahead and dial her five digit number.

In a small town like ours, operators did things we would not have the electronics to do for another thirty years or so, like speed dialing, or call forwarding. With the coming of dials, kids could do something that the operators would have nipped in the bud, "playing with the telephone." Making prank calls, asking stupid questions, giggling and hanging up, could all be done in the anonymity of dial 'phones.

There were still party lines when I was in junior high. While it was not approved behavior to listen in on party lines to another conversation, it was occasionally done. As Tom Lehrer said in his song My Home Town, "I better leave this out to be on the safe side..in my home town."

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